Uncle Ho is Dead

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire

18 August 2014

China fails the soft power test

Chinese academics showed their country's true colours when at a Sinology conference in Portugal they managed to get hold of the conference programs and rip out pages relating to the Taiwanese version of the Goethe Institut.

But 'somebody' set up a website, uploaded that video, and then claimed a copyright violation, prompting Youtube to pull it.

Sneaky little trick. But that's all it was: sneaky, not really clever.

There is a twist to all of this. The founder of Adani is a Gujarati. For what it may be worth, Gujaratis are despised by other Indians for their dishonesty, to disregard impolite epithets and to name the first of many vices that have been conveyed to me by my Indian friends. In my Western know-it-all arrogance I laughed at those quaint prejudices, but now I'm beginning to wonder whether there isn't something to it after all...

I am outraged. Whatever the merits of the claims about Adani's environmental track record (and given what we know about India in general, one can only entertain speculative doubts out of intellectual fairmindedness), one does not do this to Australians or in Australia. For better or for worse it is acceptable to defecate in the street in India: it is not acceptable here. On nationalist grounds alone, Adani must be stripped of its licence to mine in the Galilee Basin. It may treat Indian peasants with contempt, but it may not treat Australians that way.

Renewable Energy Target reduces cost of electricity

So it turns out that after all the usual ill-informed dogmatic ranting the Renewable Energy Target (RET) actually reduces the cost of electricity, contrary to what common sense would dictate.

Whoever would have thought?

And what if the modelling is wrong? A Deloittes study commissioned (albeit via stalking horse) by the carbon-based energy industry estimates that bills will rise approximately $1 a week. My heart bleeds for the poor consumer.

02 August 2014

China's propaganda infiltrating our shores

Article by Paul Monk in the SMH:

Over the past decade or so, something disturbing has been happening in
the Chinese community media in this country. The Chinese Communist
Party’s propaganda bureau has been buying up radio stations and
newspapers across the country and channelling the voice of Beijing into
them from editorial offices in China. Increasingly, topics on which
press discussion is forbidden in China have vanished also from the
Chinese language media in our own country.